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Monday, May 19, 2008

CCF restructuring

(note: this post is probably only of interest to readers in the US)

James Lee posts a note from the Visioning workshop held ahead of STOC 2008. There's some interesting news about the restructuring of CCF (the "theory" section within the NSF's Computer Science directorate). The previous CCF structure (run by Michael Foster) consisted of:

Theoretical Foundations (TF), which included all of theoryCS, as well as geometric modelling, some visualization, information theory, and signal processing.

Foundations of Computing processes and artifacts, which among other things included graphics and visualization, as well as some software, architecture, and programming languages

Emerging models, which had quantum, nano, and DNA computing.

The new CCF (which will be run by Sampath Kannan), looks like this:

Algorithmic Foundations

Communication and Information Foundations

Hardware and Software Foundations

The first one contains pretty much all of theoryCS as before, but from the sound of it will not have the other areas like information theory and signal processing (which I imagine will be in the second cluster). The algorithmic side of quantum computing (as opposed to the engineering side) will also be folded in.

One interesting comment was that geometry will be folded back into the main cluster. Currently, CG, geometric modelling, and symbolic methods have a separate pool that awards are made through, under the larger TF cluster. It sounds like this will change, and CG will "compete" in the main theory pool.

This will probably make life interesting in the short run. I don't think I'm overstating the case to say here that there's a not trivial amount of hostility between CGers on one hand, and the "regular" STOC/FOCS crowd on the other. If I had a dollar for each time someone vowed never to attend STOC/FOCS because of perceived slights to geometry, I'd never have to write grant proposals. On the other hand, I have heard (from various sources) of people who say things like 'Geometry is not real theory'.

It should be interesting to see how this all shakes out during panel review. I suspect/hope that things will happen reasonably, in that proposals will be binned and panelists assigned appropriately.